Pedagogy

[This is a roundup of news articles and other materials circulating on Turkey and reflects a wide variety of opinions. It does not reflect the views of the Turkey Page Editors or of Jadaliyya. You may send your own recommendations for inclusion in each week's roundup to turkey@jadaliyya.com by Sunday night of every week.]
English
The Evacuation of the Tomb of Suleiman Shah
The Story of a Successful Operation Nagehan Alçı reports that Prime Minister Ahmet Davutoğlu together with the Defense Minister and Chief of General Staff planned an overnight operation, in which Turkey evacuated the Tomb of Süleiman Shah in Syria and relocated it a hundred meters from the Turkish ...

[This is the third of three responses to Muriam Haleh Davis’ review essay of books by Joan W. Scott, Naomi Davidson, and Mayanthi Fernando. For Joan W. Scott’s response, “More on Laïcité in Historical Context," click here; for Naomi Davidson’s response, “The Vagaries of Laïcité,” click here.]
In bringing the work of Joan Scott and Naomi Davidson together with mine, Muriam Haleh Davis demonstrates the importance of undertaking a history of the present. This history enables us to identify some of the structuring logics of French republicanism and French secularism, as well as to track both continuities and discontinuities between past and present, something that ...

CALL FOR PROPOSALS
58th Annual Meeting of the African Studies Association
THE STATE AND THE STUDY OF AFRICA
19-22 November 2015
Sheraton San Diego Hotel and Marina
San Diego, CA
DEADLINE FOR PROPOSAL SUBMISSION: 15 March 2015
PROGRAM CHAIRS
Dismas A. Masolo, University of Louisville
Derek R. Peterson, University of Michigan
ABOUT THE MEETING
We are soliciting proposals for papers, panels, and roundtables. Presentations may focus on the theme of “The State and Study of Africa” or on broader social science, humanities, and applied themes relating to Africa. We strongly encourage the submission of formed panels. You can find more ...

Smadar Lavie, Wrapped in the Flag of Israel: Mizrahi Single Mothers and Bureaucratic Torture. New York and Oxford: Berghahn Books, 2014.
Jadaliyya (J): What made you write this book?
Smadar Lavie (SL): In February 1999 I was a star academic, on the eve of becoming a full tenured professor at University of California, Davis. I had to pack two suitcases, the family dog, and my son’s cello, and flee with him from Berkeley to save our lives. We were both victims of domestic violence that I kept secret from my colleagues. The California courts had proven unable to help us. So I fled to Israel-Palestine, where my family resides. Upon arrival, our Israeli and US passports ...

[This is a roundup of news articles and other materials circulating on Turkey and reflects a wide variety of opinions. It does not reflect the views of the Turkey Page Editors or of Jadaliyya. You may send your own recommendations for inclusion in each week's roundup to turkey@jadaliyya.com by Sunday night of every week.]
English
AKP, Draft Security Bill, Authoritarianism
Clear Intervention in Judiciary Günal Kurşun points out that the government’s arbitrary interventions into the judiciary have become systematic and widespread after the 17 December bribery and corruption operations.
The "Holy Case" “The AK Party is putting forth a new objective, which ...

Elisabeth R. Anker, Orgies of Feeling: Melodrama and the Politics of Freedom. Durham: Duke University Press, 2014.
Jadaliyya (J): What made you write this book?
Elisabeth Anker (EA): There are two answers to this question. The first is political: the idea for the book came out of anger at both the extensively violent response by the US to the 9/11 events, and the widespread support given to these operations by a vast majority of the US populace. I wondered why a narrative of good and evil mobilized such intense national sentiment to legitimate aggressive state power, while it also depoliticized this power by claiming it was a moral obligation upon injured victims. The ...

Mayanthi L. Fernando, The Republic Unsettled: Muslim French and the Contradictions of Secularism. Durham: Duke University Press, 2014.
Jadaliyya (J): What made you write this book?
Mayanthi Fernando (MF): When I first went to the field, I imagined a more conventional ethnography of the Islamic revival in France. I was interested in how a French (and more broadly European) context, in which Muslims are a minority, transforms the ritual and hermeneutical practices of the Islamic tradition. I was asking, essentially, what effect does the fact that Muslims born and raised in France are, quite literally, schooled in French republican epistemologies and values have on their ...

[This is a roundup of news articles and other materials circulating on Turkey and reflects a wide variety of opinions. It does not reflect the views of the Turkey Page Editors or of Jadaliyya. You may send your own recommendations for inclusion in each week's roundup to turkey@jadaliyya.com by Sunday night of every week.]
English
Free Kobanê
Kurdish Victory in Kobani Defeat for Turkish Policy Amberin Zaman argues that the liberation of Kobanê and the prospect of an autonomous Kurdish Syria pose a threat to the Turkish approach to the Kurdish question.
Celebrations after Kobanê's Liberation from ISIS A photo series containing images of celebrations in Diyarbakır, ...

The Middle East Studies Program and the Ali Vural Ak Center for Global Islamic Studies at George Mason University announce the deadline for applications for the Fall/Spring 2015-2016 academic year: 1 March 2015.
The aim of this degree program is to reposition the study of the Middle East and Islam within a global context to help students better analyze particular issues in light of current events and shifting historical paradigms. The program’s core classes provide a solid background in both fields of study, however students can choose to focus their coursework on either Middle East Studies or Islamic Studies. A variety of fascinating electives allow students to gain a ...

[This is a roundup of news articles and other materials circulating on Turkey and reflects a wide variety of opinions. It does not reflect the views of the Turkey Page Editors or of Jadaliyya. You may send your own recommendations for inclusion in each week's roundup to turkey@jadaliyya.com by Sunday night of every week.]
English
“Erdoğan as President,” the AKP, and Authoritarianism
An Elected President Must Show He is in Command İlnur Çevik argues that Erdoğan’s unprecedented use of constitutionally guaranteed presidential powers are part of his mandate as the first elected president in the history of the Turkish Republic.
Is This the First Step towards the ...

A subsidiary of the Arab Studies Institute, Tadween Publishing seeks to institutionalize a new form of publishing press by contributing to breaking down barriers and preconceived notions of the publication world.
Release Date: Late Spring 2015
E-book: $8.99
Print: $11.99
Book Description:
Collected from dozens of interviews with, and reports from, Iraqi feminists, labor organizers, environmentalists, and protest movement leaders, Against All Odds presents the unique voices of progressive Iraqi organizing on the ground. Dating back to 2003, with an emphasis on the 2011 upsurge in mobilization and hope as well as the subsequent embattled ...

[This is a roundup of news articles and other materials circulating on Turkey and reflects a wide variety of opinions. It does not reflect the views of the Turkey Page Editors or of Jadaliyya. You may send your own recommendations for inclusion in each week's roundup to turkey@jadaliyya.com by Sunday night of every week.]
English
Domestic Politics
Turkey Warns Twitter, Facebook of Fresh Ban Hacer Boyacıoğlu reports that Turkish authorities warned all websites not to publish leaked records related to Syrian-bound trucks belonging to the Turkish intelligence agency MIT.
Turkish Military Says MIT Shipped Weapons to al-Qaeda Fehim Taştekin reports that according to ...

Jonathan A.C. Brown, Misquoting Muhammad: The Challenges and Choices of Interpreting the Prophet’s Legacy. London: Oneworld Publications, 2014.
Jadaliyya (J): What made you write this book?
Jonathan A.C. Brown (JB): Through my teaching and public speaking, I got the sense that there was a need for a book that brought the history, inner workings, and contributions of the Islamic tradition of scriptural interpretation to a general audience. In particular, I was constantly asked “How should we understand ...

[This is a roundup of news articles and other materials circulating on Turkey and reflects a wide variety of opinions. It does not reflect the views of the Turkey Page Editors or of Jadaliyya. You may send your own recommendations for inclusion in each week's roundup to turkey@jadaliyya.com by Sunday night of every week.]
English
Özgecan Aslan, Nuh Köklü, and the Spate of Violence
Violence against Women Beril Dedeoğlu examines the rise in violence against women over the past few years and claims ...

Theorizing the Arabian Peninsula
Edited by Rosie Bsheer and John Warner
Electronic copy: $4.99
Paperback: $7.49
Combo: $9.99
A number of significant developments in the region make this an opportune moment to revisit our first JADMAG, Theorizing the Arabian Peninsula, edited by Rosie Bsheer and John Warner. The contributing authors’ concerns that rentier state theory obscures the fundamental dependence of national petroleum economies on a global capitalist labor market have ...

Andrea Khalil, editor, Gender, Women, and the Arab Spring. London and New York: Routledge, 2015.
[Editors’ Note: This book was originally published as a special issue of The Journal of North African Studies 19.2 (2014). To mark the publication of this special issue as a book, we are reprinting a NEWTON piece written by the editor, Andrea Khalil, in May 2014.]
Jadaliyya (J): What made you put together this special issue?
Andrea Khalil (AK): During my fieldwork in Tunisia (2011-13) working on a ...

[This is the second of three responses to Muriam Haleh Davis’ review essay of books by Joan W. Scott, Naomi Davidson, and Mayanthi Fernando. For Joan W. Scott’s response, “More on Laïcité in Historical Context," click here.]
A cartoon by the French cartoonist Gil from 10 January, titled “Communion nationale,” shows a white policeman frisking an ambiguously raced man standing against the wall with his hands in the air. “Je suis Charlie,” says the man, and the policeman replies, “Yeah, yeah, me too.” ...

[This is a roundup of news articles and other materials circulating on Turkey and reflects a wide variety of opinions. It does not reflect the views of the Turkey Page Editors or of Jadaliyya. You may send your own recommendations for inclusion in each week's roundup to turkey@jadaliyya.com by Sunday night of every week.]
English
AKP, Security, Authoritarianism
The World Says, "Your King Is Naked" Examining recent reports on Turkey by Human Rights Watch, Ali H. Aslan argues that the ...

A subsidiary of the Arab Studies Institute,Tadween Publishing seeks to institutionalize a new form of publishing press by contributing to breaking down barriers and preconceived notions of the publication world.
Release Date: Early Spring 2015
Ebook: $11.99
Print: $15.99
Book Description
Whatever happened to the United States’ much-vaunted post-Cold War “unipolar moment,” when it was not only supposed to be the only superpower left standing, but also one in a ...

[This is the first of three responses to Muriam Haleh Davis’ review essay of books by Joan W. Scott, Naomi Davidson, and Mayanthi Fernando. For Naomi Davidson's response, "The Vagaries of Laïcité," click here.]
I find Muriam Haleh Davis’ commentary on Charlie Hebdo and French secularism (by way of a review of three books, one of which is mine) to be clear and to the point. Davis insists on the importance of placing in historical context the paradoxical claim that laïcité is a universal ...

Toby Matthiesen, The Other Saudis: Shiism, Dissent, and Sectarianism. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2015.
Jadaliyya (J): What made you write this book?
Toby Matthiesen (TM): I became interested in the issue of sectarianism in Syria and Lebanon, where I studied Arabic and spent several summers. I wanted to understand the historical context of sect-formation and at what times these markers of identity became important in the political process. During my MA at the School of Oriental ...

Mayanthi L. Fernando, The Republic Unsettled: Muslim French and the Contradictions of Secularism. Durham: Duke University Press, 2014.
Naomi Davidson. Only Muslim: Embodying Islam in Twentieth-Century France. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2012.
Joan Wallach Scott. The Politics of the Veil. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007.
It was impossible to avoid the discussion, despite my repeated protests. In Lyon, as in the rest of France, there was nothing else to talk about—especially when I ...

Luca Anceschi, Gennaro Gervasio, and Andrea Teti, editors, Informal Power in the Greater Middle East: Hidden Geographies. London and New York: Routledge, 2014.
Jadaliyya (J): What made you put together this book?
Luca Anceschi, Gennaro Gervasio, and Andrea Teti (LA/GG/AT): It seemed to us that a wide variety of informal power dynamics and their interaction with formal institutions were not being taken particularly seriously—at least, beyond general and often Orientalist claims about “culture.” This ...

Francesco Cavatorta and Paola Rivetti, “EU–MENA Relations from the Barcelona Process to the Arab Uprisings: A New Research Agenda.” Journal of European Integration 36.6 (2014).
Jadaliyya (J): What made you write this article?
Francesco Cavatorta and Paola Rivetti (FC & PR): The process of rethinking “Arab politics” after the uprisings led us to look at how the European Union and its policies had influenced, if at all, the politics of the region. The EU has been engaged formally with countries of ...